Archives for May 5, 2016

Senator Ben Sasse… one of the few conservatives the GOP Establishment was unsuccessful in defeating in 2014 … has penned keyboarded a letter decrying the horrible state of our political culture. The TL:DR version is: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are proof that both the Democrat and Republican parties suck worse than anything has ever sucked in the cosmological history of the multiverse and maybe we should consider a third party.

Based on the outcome of the primaries, one would be well within one’s reason to conclude that the Democrats and Republicans made a bet over who could nominate the worst candidate. And they both won. However, if you back it up a bit, the fault lies not in our political parties, but in the debased electorate that chooses them.

A buddy on the Mark Zuckerberg’s Personal Data Aggregator expressed it this way. (No link, it was in a closed group. Edited for clarity.)

Andrew Breitbart said that politics is downstream from culture. And perhaps the most egregious mistake conservatives have made in the last eight years is in telling themselves that what we have is a good, innocent country somehow held “hostage” against its will by bad people in Washington.

The truth is far harsher and less comforting. We don’t have a “good, innocent country.” What we have is a country that has completely lost its way, and resultantly we have a government very much reflective of that fact.

The problem with America today is not that the government does not reflect or is unresponsive to the desires of the body politic–it is that the government reflects the body politic far MORE than the Founders ever intended.

And the longer people continue in the self-delusion that their problem is the politicians, the longer it will take them to arrive at any kind of genuine solution.

An electorate that is greedy, corrupt, and ill-informed trendiness has elected a political class that has distilled those qualities to become a sort of balsamic reduction of greed, corruption, and trendy ignorance.

How long history will tolerate a culture grown so fat, lazy, and stupid is an open question.

Ilya Shapiro presents an interesting thesis: That Donald Trump’s Candidacy is a product of a plurality of Republican voters having become disillusioned with America’s Constitutional form of Government. That the utter failure of the Republican Party to stop any part of Barack Obama’s radical agenda has convinced them that the only way to counter the left is to elect an equally authoritarian “strong man” who will similarly ignore Constitutional Restraints and impose his will on their behalf.

The Republican Congress has not only been utterly ineffectual in opposing Obama’s policies, but has consistently voted to fully fund them. The one time the Congress very briefly, very tentatively stood up to Obama (the so-called “Government Shutdown” of 2013 that didn’t actually shut down anything), they not only folded immediately, but abjectly apologized and promised that such insolence would never happen again and those responsible (Ted Cruz, Mike Lee) would be punished.

The Supreme Court … led by a supposedly conservative George W. Bush appointee … saved Obamacare twice through Cirque du Soleil quality legal distortions, overturned Arizona’s illegal immigration enforcement policies (because they displeased Obama), and created a brand new Constitutional Right to “dignity” in upholding gay marriage laws enacted in many cases against the wishes of the citizenry. Thus, the Roberts Court showed it cared not a whit for the Constitution, but would also… most of the time … roll over for President Obama.

Apologists repeating over-and-over “There’s nothing we can do because we don’t have the Presidency,” is a de facto admission that Congress is irrelevant in the era of the Baracktatorship.

This is a very plausible thesis, and I say that from the perspective of having been at one time sympathetic to the idea of a Trump candidacy (before he got down in the gutter). He was not my first, second, third, fourth, or fifth choice. (FWIW: Paul, Walker, Cruz, Jindal, Perry) But I understood his appeal against a corrupt and ineffectual Republican Establishment, and before I came to the conclusion that his sudden conversion on issues like illegal immigration, trade, abortion, and gun control (the precise opposite of his previous views), was insincere opportunism, I could entertain the idea of a Trump candidacy. It was the sleazy campaign and the mounting evidence of his insincerity that pushed me to #NeverTrump.

But can I understand why someone would turn to Trump after every other instrument of the party had betrayed them? Totally.

Kenneth Shupe said he was called to pick up a woman stranded on I-26 in Asheville on Monday.

When he saw “a bunch of Bernie Sanders stuff” he said he told the woman, “very politely,” that he could’t tow her car because she was “obviously a socialist” and advised her to “call the government” for a tow.

“Every business dealing in recent history with a socialist minded person I have not gotten paid,” Shupe said. “Every time I deal with these people I get ‘Berned’ with an ‘e’ not a ‘u’.”

I don’t think he did anything wrong; a business owner ought to have the right to refuse service to people if he finds their views offensive. Right, Bruce Springsteen? Right Michael Moore?

The Food and Drug Administration issued its final guidance for an Obamacare regulation mandating calorie labeling in restaurants, which includes a 171-word definition of “menu,” and will apply to coupons and advertisements.

The final guidance includes a 96-word definition of “combination meal” and a 163-word definition of “restaurant-type food.” The government also goes into when “Aunt Cora’s French toast breakfast” must have its calories listed and tells restaurants not to use plus or minus signs on their menus because they are too “confusing” to Americans. [Emphasis added.]

The government considers a menu to be the “primary writing of the covered establishment from which a customer makes an order selection, including, but not limited to, breakfast, lunch and dinner menus; dessert menus; beverage menus, children’s menus, other specialty menus (such as catering), electronic menus, and menus on the Internet.” The full definition is 171 words. Merriam-Webster has a 12-word definition for menu.

The phrase “from which a customer makes an order selection” opened the door for coupons and advertisements to be included in the mandate.

The FDA said calories must be listed on coupons if they have the restaurant’s phone number, and advertisements can be “considered a menu.”